Electronic communications such as email and instant messages are commonly used for personal and business communications. Unsolicited commercial electronic messages and other unwanted messages can inundate users. Such messages are commonly referred to as spam.
Commonly legitimate messages are incorrectly categorized as spam and rerouted to seldom-checked “junk mail” folders or simply not delivered. Such incorrect categorizations, known as “false positives,” cause problems because users may not see such incorrectly categorized legitimate messages, and therefore are unable to read or respond to them.
Users often receive such legitimate messages in response to providing their messaging addresses, e.g. email addresses, via the web to a legitimate sender, anticipating that such a sender may subsequently send messages to their messaging address. Previously known techniques do not permit users to authorize message delivery when they provide consent to receive messages, and therefore such consented-to messages may be incorrectly categorized by a spam filter, even though the user has requested the communication.
It would be useful to have improved techniques for mitigating the adverse effects of spam, including the adverse effects of false positives from spam filtering.